A week ago Nadine Dorries launched the 20 weeks Campaign through the Daily Mail, which wrote up this glowing story and dedicated its editorial comment strip to supporting it. The 20 Weeks website has Nadine Dorries MP’s picture on every page and she has promoted it relentlessly through her blog. So we can reasonably assume it is her campaign.

But who is behind this campaign? Is it just Ms Dorries? The website doesn’t say. On the Q&A page however it does have this question: Is this a religious campaign?. Answer: “No. There are people of all faiths and of no faith who support this campaign.”

But that’s about it. Shouldn’t we be told who is running a campaign fronted by a Conservative MP?
I say this because thanks to Unity we can provide the answer. A search on the domain name reveals that it was registered by David Clark. Email address: david@ccfon.org.
That email address is a give-away because David Clark is in fact one of the founding members of Christian Concern for our Nation.

In other words, Nadine Dorries is fronting and representing campaign without declaring that is in fact being run by a religious group that: “exists to serve the Church by providing information to enable Christians to publicly stand up against a tide of unchristian legal and political changes in the United Kingdom..”

If this is indeed a campaign specifically by Nadine Dorries MP, then a Christian group is funding it. The website specifically says it is not a religious campaign yet it is funded and most likely designed by a religious organisation that is not listed anywhere.

CCFON launched its own anti-abortion website recently called Alive and Kicking. AaK is linked to from the 20 weeks website in numerous places.

CCFON is close to the Conservative Christian Fellowship (CCF), which was co-founded by Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome and includes Caroline Spelman MP as one of its members. The website says that: “For many years the CCF has been hosted within Conservative Campaign Headquarters.” Sweet.

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[Yesterday I pointed out how Nadine Dorries has, I believe, broken parliamentary rules and have submitted an official letter of complaint to that effect. All this week we’ll be exposing the Tory MP’s campaign here on LC]

I’d think it’s at least partially because the CCFON’s Alive and Kicking Campaign supports far, far more stringent restrictions on abortion than Dorries claims to support on the grounds of advances in neonatal care.

Their website states that “our near-term objective is to halve the yearly abortions” and that they seek “a prohibition of abortions for social convenience.” Any guesses, then, what their long-term objective might be?

It’s also worth noting that a number of the other named supporters for Dorries’ campaign (nearly all also members of the Alive and Kicking Campaign alliance) include LIFE and and the ProLife Alliance, who appear to oppose all abortion (excepting where a mother’s life is at risk) on the grounds that life begins at the point of fertilisation.

Ah yes, we’ve been through this one before, haven’t we Ashley – and you’re no more intelligent this time than last….

I’ve actually never asked exactly who funds the site. I assume its Sunny but regardless of that he’s a known quantity and far from anonymous, the hosting costs for the site will amount to no more than a $100 a year and everything else is done on a voluntary basis…

…and the provision of false information on a domain registration – and really couldn’t you have come up with something a little more original than ‘John Doe’ – is still a breach of terms and conditions when registering a top level domain, which is what I told you last time we had something like this conversation.

Who’s your registrar? Ah, yes – it’s ENOM

ACCOUNT CONTACT INFORMATION AND DOMAIN NAME WHOIS INFORMATION: As further consideration for the Service(s), you agree to provide certain current, complete and accurate information about you, both with respect to your account information and with respect to the WHOIS information for your domain name(s). You agree to maintain and update this information as needed to keep it current, complete and accurate. With respect to you, the administrative, technical, and billing contacts for your domain name registration(s) and other Service(s), you must submit the following: name, postal address, e-mail address, voice telephone number, and where available, fax number. You agree that the type of information you are required to provide may change and you understand that, if you do not provide the newly required information, your registration or and/or other Service(s) may be suspended or terminated or may not be renewed.

When we elect an MP, most of us do not do so on the basis of their religion. We vote for them expecting them to represent our interests and their manifesto, not their religion or creed. So while on the abortion issue I am not entirely convinced, I do think that we should work to detach religious pressure groups such as these from politics.

Because the danger with groups like Christian Concern for our Nation is that they are seeking political power and traction through people’s religious allegiance. Like Alan Craig of ‘the Christian Choice’ they are claiming to represent the views of a religion, the followers of which have a vast range of different beliefs.

Fundamentally a ‘Christian choice’ is a Christian’s own and if we allow these religious pressure groups to gain too much influence, then we will end up with the kind of religious politics that there is in the States, with all the troubles that causes.

Politicians will always be influenced by their religious beliefs of course. But by hosting CCFN within Conservative campaign HQ, and by pushing it in the kind of way that Dorries has, there is a real danger that these important democratic distinctions will be blurred.

How the hell is it “Pravda stuff” to quote the actual data on crime rates? The BCS and reported crime levels both show that crime in London peaked in 2002 (yes, Ken drove it up cynically in the first two years of his mayorship…) and has been falling since. Same for homicide rates, which you can’t really fault even if you’re mad enough to believe that Gordon breaks into the ONS at night and rigs the crime statistics.

Traditional tabloid scaremongering, combined with the ability to track All Horrible Crimes Everywhere brought by the Internet and 24-hour news (previously, Joe Bloggs would only be aware of major crimes that reached the nationals & evening bulletins; now you can find every beating in Scunthorpe with just a couple of clicks on the BBC site) have helped massively skew people’s perception of crime, which is unfortunate. But it’s the “the sky is falling” commentators who’re taking the Pravda role, not the people who dispassionately look at the data.

“Would you ascribe any of this to the greater availability of abortion in the last 15-20 years?”

I’m sceptical of the methodology used by the Freakonomics guys – dsquared has a critique; I don’t know enough about sociology to know whether their hypothesis is even plausible (the social pattern of abortions vs pregnancies in a given age group skews towards higher education/higher income background, which is a data point suggesting not); and it doesn’t actually resolve any of the questions relating to abortion anyway (if killing foetuses is wrong and should be stopped, then we shouldn’t allow it just because it creates a marginal reduction in the crime rate 20 years down the line). So no, overall I wouldn’t.

It beggars belief that anyone should try to hide behind the official stats, unless they are a total government stooge or they don’t live in London.

The fallout from the Jimmy Mizen murder and this latest stabbing on Oxford Street will be the biggest political toughening up on crime since before all that waffle about ‘tough on crime’ and yet this whole blog has been given over to the abortion issue and hounding a Tory backbencher.

Would you ascribe any of this to the greater availability of abortion in the last 15-20 years?

You really haven’t got a clue, have you?

In the last 20 years, the annual number of abortions in England & Wales – and we’ll stick to the resident population here – has increased by around 25,000.

There were 168,000 in 1988 and 193,000 in 2006 – if you’re cite greater availability then you need to look at the 70’s & 80s, not the last 20 years.

The fallout from the Jimmy Mizen murder and this latest stabbing on Oxford Street will be the biggest political toughening up on crime since before all that waffle about ‘tough on crime’ and yet this whole blog has been given over to the abortion issue and hounding a Tory backbencher.

If that’s so important to you, then please feel free to go get your own blog and write about it. Both Blogger and WordPress.com are free.

and yet this whole blog has been given over to the abortion issue and hounding a Tory backbencher.

As part of a wider campaign on a new laws in the making. There’s no laws on stabbing etc being opposed by the level of idiocy Nadine displays. Also LC isn’t an organisation with paid staff and funds, this means it has to act with some strategic calculation on which campaigns it can undertake.

But yeah as Unity said if you feel so strongly start your own blog/campaign. If you got time to spend commenting here surely you have time to go put your money were your mouth with your own initiative?

Perhaps Sunny could give us the official version of who runs and funds Lib Con?

Its a ZOG conspiracy. Didn’t we explain that?

Once I become a democratically elected member of parliament feel free to ask all the questions you want. Unless of course, you prefer that our MPs remain opaque with their dealings. Or that you only ask these questions when right-wing Tory MPs are fingered and not left-wing ones.

I think Cassilis is just a touch puzzled by the suddenness with which this has all coalesced without realising that this has been building quietly for months, ever since she tried to smear Ben Goldacre and then ran away and hid when she got called on it.

It’s very noticeable that but for ToryHome, Cranmer and an attempt at a pissweak bit of deflection by Dizzy, the Tory blogosphere has gone deathly quiet over last few days on Dorries, largely, I think, because she’s made such a poor job of the whole thing that her campaign is rapidly becoming an embarrassment that no one wants to be associated with.

There’ll inevitably be the odd total muppet, like Praguetory, but otherwise it seems that few Tories are willing to allow themselves to be pulled in trying to defend a bunch of indefensible arguments in order to ride shotgun for an eminently disposable backbench MP.

I think Cassilis is just a touch puzzled by the suddenness with which this has all coalesced without realising that this has been building quietly for months

Why not simply ask the question “Why has all this come about, have I been missing something?” or do some Googling instead of drawing some uninformed possible conclusion or waving about some vague accusation with no evidence of an anti Tory/Dale agenda?

Lemme try my hand at this; ‘you know…urgh…that Cassilis comment…hmmm just asking like but did some Tory blogger ask him to raise it to muddy the waters because they can’t…? Sincere question…just asking…like.”

Even DK is laying into her now, kind puts paid the idea this is some anti tory agenda…

Indeed: I first wrote about that utter waste of space, Nadine Dorries, back in June ’07 and have done so regularly since (although I’ve mainly built on the fine work done by Unity and Bookdrunk).

Mind you, since I despise the Tories almost as much as Labour, it doesn’t necessarily put paid to any conspiracy theories floating about out there. But then again, I have little time for any kind of tribalism, really.

DK’s been on this pretty much from the off – unlike some self-styled libertarians his values run further than just tax cuts.

DK, fair point I’d actually forgotten you’re previous work on this. Regarding the ‘put paid to conspiracy theories’, granted you’re no fan of the Tories but the point is this isn’t some lefty only conspiracy, your involvement demonstrates, at least in part, it has wider support and it’s about the actual campaign objectives.

As we both know any attempt to frame this as merely an anti Tory venture simply serves to distract from those objectives (if anyone is actually stupid enough to fall for that that is).

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